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From KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Seashells may seem a curiosity, but in a new book, The Sound of the Sea,

environmental writer Cynthia Barnett makes a case for their centrality

through history. Indigenous people from what we now call Emoryville to the Andes Mountains,

built their cities and societies in part with shells. Shells have been money and the centerpieces

of legends and evidence in some of our most important scientific theories. In our time, shells hold another message for a humanity that is denuding and deranging the oceans.

Barnett writes, the mollus symbolize all of nature in being exploited and brought to the brink of

what is bearable, the dissolution of their exquisite homes in an acidifying sea.

That's all next on Forum, after this news.

For millennia, human beings have been fascinated by seashells, their intricate architecture

and bewildering variety. But they are more than mere trinkets, as environmental journalist

Cynthia Barnett argues in her new book, The Sound of the Sea, Shells and the Fate of the Oceans.

Seashells have helped explain the history of the Earth and the animals that make them foretell trouble in our warming oceans.

...